upgrades, programming, catching up

Whew.

Finally upgraded my mail/web system to Red Hat 7.2 beta (Roswell). All
filesystems are now ext3 with journalling enabled, with no noticable
performance difference (actually, testing by others implied that it should
be faster than before). They switched over to using
grub as the default boot
loader (LILO is still there, for those stuck on it). No major breakage,
although it was a bit of a PITA merging the Apache httpd.conf files.

Two new certifications from
BrainBench: "Master, Unix Korn Shell
Scripting" and "C". I'm relatively impressed; the tests actually seem to
work the topic pretty well. In a similar vein, my refamiliarization with PHP
spurred me into redoing my
online resume.
Looks a LOT better than previous incarnations.

An old friend came to town this week on business; haven't seen him in
about 7 years, and it was pretty cool catching up on where he's at now,
and sort of comparing notes over the last few years. He now has two kids,
and a work-from-home (most of the time) job doing Java development for a
company in England. Not too shabby, although the tech downturn seems to
have hit his company too.

Started refreshing my memory on Java again, writing my usual refresher
application: a multi-user chat system. It seems to give a good balance;
you need to be able to handle a TCP listener and multiple incoming
connections, pass messages back and forth, and keep track of logs. It's
a good language workout. I've decided that java.io.* is simply overkill,
though. I mean, do you really need that many ways to handle input and
output? Yeesh.

Haven't been exercising much lately; life seems to have become very
busy. Hopefully we'll get down to a Tae-Kwon Do club sometime next week to
see how we like it.